


Sky's Short Stories

by Skairunner



Category: Worm - Wildbow
Genre: King's Row (Overwatch), OCs - Freeform, PRT, Post-Canon, Short
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-26
Updated: 2017-10-26
Packaged: 2019-01-23 10:32:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12505416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skairunner/pseuds/Skairunner
Summary: A compilation of the short stories for Worm that I write. Topics and characters vary wildly, but most of them tell full stories within themselves.





	1. Index

**Author's Note:**

> This is the table of contents of this compilation. Will be edited as I go.

**Obsidian Edge** (3044w)

A girl with a knife and her brother make their way through the wilderness after the end. Post-GM. Experimental prose style.

**PRT Story**

_One:_  Sgt. Sean McKenzie and her squad of four officers, attached to the Brockton Bay division of the PRT, deploy to a rogue cape attack on a grocery store in Brockton Bay. PRT-centric. (4599w)

 _Two:_  The great bureaucracy machine of the PRT turns evermore. Sean fills out paperwork, and Armsmaster talks to Bellsong. (5108w)

 **Spun Out** (2480w)

Taylor is accidentally caught in a fight between an assassin and a vigilante on a rooftop in King’s Row. Overwatch/Worm.

 **Step One** (4778w)

A girl in CUI-dominated Korea gains powers. She soon finds herself on the run from Yangban enforcers.

 


	2. PRT Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sgt. Sean McKenzie and her squad of four officers, attached to the Brockton Bay division of the PRT, deploy to a rogue cape attack on a grocery store in Brockton Bay. PRT-centric.

The harsh electric buzzers of the Parahuman Response Team, Brockton Bay Division, Floor Bravo Two went off three times. On the third buzz, three lights on the status panel mounted in each room turned on—the ones for Squads Three, Nine and Eighteen. Sergeant Sean McKenzie looked around. The four other members of Squad Nine were sitting around the bare room, the room lacking personality as only a PRT standard design room could: bright strip lights in carefully designed housings to minimize glare, six large lockers against two walls, and generic metal-with-wood-seat benches lining the middle. Her squad was already suited up—they were on Rapid Response shift today and tomorrow. Sean checked her infopad one more time, then took a deep breath.

“Alright, ladies,” she said, grinning behind her faceplate. “Go time! We have sixty seconds, so Jin and Bernard get on foam, Saffins get the tranqs, and Jay grenade launcher.”

Sean watched her squad move to the lockers and pick up their extra gear. Normally, she’d prefer not to deploy, but since they were Rapid Response today, they had to stay suited up anyways. It didn’t quite make for a comfortable resting experience. And the tapped Rapid Response squad was usually taken off of duty for the remainder of the day after a deployment.

“Situation’s in commercial district,” she added as Jin and Bernard were struggling into the foam tanks. “We got a low-to-mid Mike Alpha slash Sierra Hotel. That’s Master-slash-Shaker in not-jargon.”

“What kind of Master?” asked Jay, leaning backwards on his bench. Which wasn’t a mean feat, considering how damn heavy the full PRT body armor was.

“Uhhh, console says they’re not sure”—she ignored Jay’s snort of derision—“but the civilians are panicked, fighting or running. Some sort of Shaker paranoia effect. We’re to contain and secure the perimeter, keep distance from the target building, wait for Squad Three and Eighteen and Armsmaster, then follow him in. Alright, let’s go.”

The five of them filed out of the room and jogged towards the PRT van, taking the stairs up a level to the garage.

“MSP?” asked Corporal Jin in her characteristically soft voice, over the comms system build into the helmets. Sean knew that Alexis Jin preferred to use the mic whenever possible. Probably why she hadn’t asked this question in the locker room.

“Not for our job, we’re staying far away from the cape. Going to be screening post-op, though, and probably tier one field protocols when we move in.”

“Got it.”

The white van’s engine was already running when they piled into it. It was yet another standard PRT design, the van was incredibly generic in terms of make, though the purple diagonal stripes on the left and right sides and the green/white emergency lights gave it at least a little bit of character.

Sean felt the van start to pull out of the PRT garage, the sharp emergency sirens starting up, and buckled herself into the molded seat closest to the front. Cpl. Jin sat across from her, Cpl. Saffins next to Jin, and Ofc. Jay and Bernard to Sean’s right. Jay cradled the bulky grenade launcher in his lap, while Jin and Bernard were both awkwardly sitting on the edge of the seat, as their foam tanks were in the way. Sean, herself, had her rifle loaded with rubber bullets on her lap as she read her infopad.

“Sucks to be on foam duty,” Jay said.

“I’ll make sure to laugh at you extra hard when it’s your turn.” Jin’s words were dripping with malice.

“We’re not on rapid response next week, so…” Jay shrugged the best he could in the armor, and the end result was a little stiff. “I think I’ll be perfectly fine.”

Jin turned her head towards Jay. Sean imagined she was giving him a glare, but the visor made it hard to tell.

“Hate you so much.”

“Hey, maybe we’ll get lucky and get called out all five days,” said Saffins. “I’m sure Jay will love that.”

“What are the odds? Next to nil if you ask me.” Jay tapped a finger on his grenade launcher. “And even if it did happen, we’ll all be suffering together. One big happy suffering family.”

The van went over a bump. Sean checked her pad again, then slipped it into its pouch on the side of her leg. She breathed in deeply, then out, to calm that electric thrill that always happened before starting an op. As Jin started talking, Sean touched her left middle finger to her thumb to activate her own mic and spoke over her.

“Clear comms, guys, we’re ETA one minute. Sorry, Jin. Situation’s not changed—commercial district isn’t far from HQ, so all we missed was some runners. We’re going to deploy, spread out, and foam or dart everyone who’s trying to run away. They’re all civilians, so try to go with the foam if possible and avoid the head. The store doesn’t have a door in the back, only a locked loading dock, so we’ll be holding the front. Squads Three and Nineteen are gearing up and should be here soon. Last report, the cape was still inside the store.”

“Sounds kinda messed up,” Saffins said. “Foaming civilians.” She shook her head.

“Orders.” Sean made the mistake of trying to shrug, and managed to feel like she bruised her shoulders for her efforts. How did Jay do it? “And, you know, the Master effect could be worse than we thought. Lasting effects. HQ probably wants to screen them just in case.”

“I hate Masters,” Jin said.

“Yeah,” Jay said. He hefted his grenade launcher after unbuckling his harness. “I’ll keep the spooky Masters away from you.”

“On my mark,” Sean said, unlatching the door and swinging it open with her free hand. “Mark.” She hopped out of the car and moved to the left to leave the exit clear, then got her bearings, squinting as her eyes adapted to the daylight sun.

The van had stopped in the parking lot for one of those big stores that took up an entire, large building by themselves. There were a lot of civilians scattered around the parking lot, maybe thirty or so, most of them looking like your typical large-grocery-store clientele. They were acting more like scared animals than scared people, Sean noticed. Almost all of them were spread out, trying to keep as much distance from each other, and she noticed that a couple of them actually had guns raised. If there were any corners in this parking lot, people would be in them. The word paranoia seemed about right.

As the rest of her squad climbed out of the van, she started thinking of tactics. The gun-wielders had to go first, and since the tranq rifle was air-powered Saffins might be able to neutralize all of them before they have time to shoot back. Saffins’d probably need to stay behind the van—she suspected that “out of sight, out of mind” would highly apply here. The rest of the civilians could be lightly foamed to keep them out of the way, and then they could hold the main entrances. There were three of those. Would the civilians panic from being foamed, though? Maybe the elderly would have to be tranq’d too… Sean mentally shook her head and gave orders.

“Alright, everyone get behind the van.” Sean crouched next to the rear tire as her squad hustled around her. “Saffins needs to tranq the … three guys with the guns.” Three too many for her comfort. She pointed out the three civilians with guns. “E-eighty-eight skinhead, tall guy in a suit, and the blond girl with the white shirt. Then we move in and foam the rest. And probably arrest the girl, I doubt she’s legally carrying.”

“Roger that,” Saffins said, crouching diagonally behind Sean. “Firing now.” She raised her tranq rifle and peered through the scope, squeezed the trigger with a quiet snap and acquired a new target. “Skinhead down.”

She did this twice more, then reported, “Missed the girl, she dodged.”

Sean frowned. The girl shouldn’t have been aware enough of the situation to try dodging, and since she was armed, she wasn’t a threat that could be neutralized with confoam as easily. Now that she was aware that someone is trying to shoot her, it would be tough to land a tranquilizer shot, too—and tranqs were Tinkertech ammo, expensive and in low supply. It was a balancing act between risk of injury and decisiveness of action—being careful reduced risk but increased the likelihood the plan wouldn’t go as planned, and vice versa.

She hoped she wasn’t making the wrong call.

“One’s good. Jin with Saffins to the left, and Saffins get the girl again. Jay and Bernard with me to the right, and meet in front of the store. Let’s go, go, go.” She transitioned from her crouch to a run and flicked her external mic on.

“Hands up and on the ground, or you will be foamed for your own safety,” she broadcasted as she ran. Three civilians nearby were startled and tried to flee, but were quickly brought down with three taps of Bernard’s foam dispenser. “Jay, shoot the ‘nades at the runners too far for foam.”

“What’s the confoam range, again?” Jay raised his weapon and fired a grenade with a pop. It flew in a high arc above the parking lot and burst into grey foam over the head of a man on the opposite side of the crowd.

“Twenty, thirty feet? Harder to aim further though,” Bernard said. “You should know this.”

A pistol went off twice, the sharp report echoing around the lot. Sean flinched and turned.

“Fuck! She shot me,” Jin said over comms.

“Shoot her, Saffins,” Sean said. Opening fire on a harmless civilian was bad PR. Opening fire on a civilian who’s already shot at a PRT officer was fair game. The girl fired another two rounds before running towards cover behind a car. Saffins dropped her tranq gun, which was attached to her by a harness, and raised her rifle. “Bernard, keep moving and foaming.” She heard more gunshots.

“Stings like a motherfucker,” Jin complained. Sean spared a glance at her and saw that the armor in front of her shoulder was heavily pitted. That, from a 9mm gun?

“She’s down,” Saffins reported. Sean could almost hear the frown as she said that. She knew that Saffins was against harming civilians on principle. She followed orders, though, and that was what was important.

“I’m foaming her now,” Jin said. “She aims well, I’ll give her that.”

Sean’s trio was about halfway done foaming the civilians, while Jin and Saffins were less successful due to having to deal with the girl. Some of the civilians were starting to get far enough so that her squad might lose them.

“Jay, go help Jin.”

“Roger that,” he drawled. He ran towards the other two and fired another foam grenade, immobilizing a pair of civilians that got too close to each other while trying to squeeze through a pair of cars.

The rest of the foaming went without much incident, with Saffins shooting the couple who had managed to run out of foam range with her tranquilizer rounds and Bernard and Jin foaming everyone. They regrouped twenty feet in front of the grocery store.

“I’m going to be bruised for a week,” Jin complained, rolling her shoulder.

“Hush, it’s just a flesh wound,” Jay said.

Sean set her radio to the HQ channel and reported in. “HQ, Nine actual, we’ve got the perimeter secured and holding position.”

“I don’t get how she hit every single shot in basically the same spot,” Jin said. “Think she’s Miss Militia in disguise?”

“If Miss Militia’s a white, blond teenager,” Saffins said.

“Squad Nine, HQ. Armsmaster, Three and Nineteen are inbound, ETA three minutes,” crackled the reply.

“Roger,” she said, and flicked back to squad comms. “We’re holding here and liberally foaming anyone that comes out. Backup’s coming quick, maybe five minutes.”

“It seems like a bit overkill to send three squads and a hero for one cape,” Bernard said.

“I think it’s because they weren’t sure if they were being controlled or just panicked,” Jin said.

“Didn’t they say it was a Sierra Hotel? Are we being Mastered right now?” There was an undertone of concern in Saffins’s voice.

Jay snorted. “If we are, they’re doing a shit job at it. I don’t feel a thing.”

“Or an amazing job,” Saffins said.

Sean tuned out the chatter as she thought of what the tactical situation would be inside. While she wouldn’t be commanding all three squads—someone who outranked her was bound to show up when more than two squads were involved—it was something interesting to think about. She knew that it was going to be a bit of a tactical nightmare—shelving units tall as a man arranged in long aisles were bad places to be caught in a cape-fight. Though the target wasn’t suspected to be a blaster, so small consolations. Visibility would be fine, because it was a mostly mental cape, but the fact that the specifics of their power were unknown would probably make her hesitant to split the squads… She shook her head. It was good that she wasn’t going to be leading the three squads in. And they would have Armsmaster. He seemed to be always confident, always prepared, and always ready to inspire. Maybe it came with being a Tinker, or maybe it was his natural leadership, but a lot of her fellow PRT officers respected the man, and Sean was no exception.

“Incoming,” Bernard called out, shaking Sean from her thoughts. She turned around and saw two PRT vans rolling into the parking lot, led by Armsmaster on his striking Tinkertech motorcycle, which matched his silver-lined matte blue armor in style.

The hero dismounted in a smooth motion. “Report?”

Sean straightened. She was reporting to Armsmaster. The man practically radiated an aura of justice, and she felt proud that the PRT and Protectorate had his help. “Sir. Twenty or thirty civilians were outside and terrified. Squad Nine foamed or tranquilized all of them. Three were armed and one fired on Corporal Jin, but was taken down. No-one has come out of the grocery store, and we haven’t heard any demands, sir.” It wasn’t PRT protocol to salute when reporting, but her hand twitched like she wanted to.

He nodded. “The PRT hotline fielded a call earlier today from a woman who said that her daughter struck her and made her panicked for roughly an hour before she could call us. The description matches: she felt an intense sense of isolation and fear. Her report, though, makes me think the cape is actually a Striker, not a Shaker.” Armsmaster unslung one of his halberd-poles from his back and shook it out so that it expanded into its full length. “The Director believes the cape is a new trigger and panicked, and that it will be possible to convince her to stand down. I will go in alone and attempt to negotiate with her.”

“Should we stand down, sir?” Three squads of PRT soldiers was starting to really feel like overkill, now.

“No. I will be reporting in every five minutes. If I do not, consider me compromised.” Sean noticed that he had switched to the All Squads frequency. When did that happen? “Lt. Bowen has Squad Three and is the next in chain of command, followed by Sgt. McKenzie of Squad Nine. Questions?”

Sean wet her lips uneasily. She was third in command. It was just one cape, though, and not a Brute or Blaster, so it was thankfully unlikely that enough people would be taken out for it to come down to her. She didn’t voice her fears, though.

After a short pause, the gravelly voice of Lieutenant Bowens came over the line. “Negative, Armsmaster.”

The hero nodded once, sharply. “I’m going in now.” He walked towards the middle sliding door of the grocery store with purposeful steps, halberd held lightly in one hand.

Sean let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding, as her squadmates started chattering over comms again. She was suddenly so tired. Hopefully she could go home soon and pass out.

~~~

Armsmaster kept breathing evenly as he strode into the grocery store. A flick of an eye was enough to set a five minute repeating timer for the check-in. Protocols were made for good reason, and the Master/Stranger protocols in particular were the result of years of field experience. Of course he would strictly keep to the promised check-in period.

For some reason, he had expected the interior to be dim or even pitch-black, but the lights were at full operational capacity. Hell, the automatic sliding doors worked perfectly fine, too. He frowned, and made a quick verbal note to think of why he had thought it would be dark. It wasn’t important right now, though.

There was produce scattered all over the floor. He could see smashed apples, split watermelons and trampled vegetables near the open refrigerators. Walking down the length of the store, he spotted overturned carts blocking the dried foods aisle, and that one of the closed style fridges had shattered glass. Could this have been the work of a paranoia-inducing Master, or did she have more powers than that? If she was directly controlling them… No, that didn’t fit the facts. The civilians outside were scattered and didn’t make any motions to fight the PRT, aside from the one that had a gun. He needed to debrief her, and more importantly make sure she wasn’t punished for what she did.

Armsmaster was moving towards the more open meat area towards the back of the store when he felt his hair standing on end. He frowned. “I’ve stepped into range of the Master effect,” he reported. “I feel on edge for no logical reason.” Perhaps a Shaker effect combined with a Striker one? That was annoying—it reduced the likelihood of being able to be in range long enough without being overcome by paranoia, in order to negotiate.

“Roger that,” Lt. Bowen said.

The report mentioned a ringing sound… Was there…? Armsmaster shut off his comms system and listened.

Yes, there was a faint tinkling noise. Like wind-chimes.

He pivoted once, twice, three times to pinpoint the direction it was coming from, then glanced at the map he had downloaded earlier, that was currently projected on his helmet’s HUD. The retort-packaged foods aisle. He turned his comms back on and reported so.

As he got closer, he could hear the bells better. There wasn’t a particular pattern he could pick up on—he would hear ting, a long pause, then a tong ting in quick succession. A fourth bell would chime just after he’d have expected the next beat. And so on. Was this an intentional attack? He turned the corner and saw the cape.

She did not look very threatening. For one, she couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old.

She was a slim Asian girl with long black hair and no mask, somewhere on the edge between plain and pretty, dressed in a plain T-shirt tucked into a skirt. The bell sounds matched up to each time she took a step, and she was hop-skipping across the tiles in the floor like little children sometimes did. She froze when Armsmaster appeared.

Her eyes met Armsmaster’s. Widened. He realized he was pointing his halberd at the girl—when had that happened?—and he deliberately relaxed his stance so that the tip pointed down. “Hello,” he tried.

“Um. H-hi.” Her accent was very native Brockton Bay.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Armsmaster said. He was tempted to start the conversation by verifying who she was, but that was a good way to cause her to clam up. She would think she’s being interrogated and try to run.

“I s-sorta hurt a lot of people,” she mumbled, looking away.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You panicked. It’s understandable.” He shifted his grip on his halberd. “Nobody will hold it against you.”

“I hurt mom,” she added.

“We can figure it out. First, I need to say that you’re safe, and I’m safe. Is that okay?” He figured that warning her before talking in the air at her was a good idea.

“Okay.”

“I’ve located the cape,” he said, raising a hand to his helmet. The gesture was more for the girl’s benefit than his, because like all of the PRT officers, his comms switch was built into his gauntlets… as well as three other methods of activating, including eye gestures, which he disliked because of how clunky it was. “She is not hostile, and I will be talking to her.”

“No offense, Armsmaster, but…” There was hesitation on the lieutenant’s side. “See local?”

He felt a spike of irritation. “Giant traffic. Wrong protocols, but commendable. I don’t think we’re dealing with that kind of Master.” He glanced at the girl, who still seemed a bit too ready to run at any moment, shifting from foot to foot nervously, causing faint tinkles with every step.

“Had to try, sir.”

Armsmaster turned his attention to the girl. “Are you Daniella Cho?”

The girl squeaked. “Yes.”

Armsmaster tried to soften his tone, but it was difficult. He was finding it strangely hard to concentrate on little social cues like that. “Do you… know what your powers do?”

Maybe that was the wrong thing to say. The girl, Daniella, practically burst into tears.

“Oh god, I don’t know! I just… every time I take a step, it makes a sound, and people look at me weirdly and when I bumped into them they start screaming and running and fighting and—“ She started stamping her foot in anguish, which caused louder sounds, more like a gong than a bell now.

Armsmaster pointed his halberd away from the girl again and took a deep breath. His heartrate was up, and he was feeling antsy. This must be her power at work.

“I know that this must be very hard for you,” he started. Daniella nodded, still crying. “Are you … Can you stand still? Your power… I think it makes people nervous when you walk. Even if you’re aware of it.”

Daniella stopped, but soon started fidgeting and bouncing her leg. Armsmaster took another deep breath and absently twirled his halberd. It was a habit he entertained sometimes, because it helped him relax.

“I… It feels really bad to stop moving,” she said. “I get so full of energy and it has to go somewhere…” She was wringing her hands now, too.

“We can deal with that,” Armsmaster managed. His halberd slapped into his hands. “Would you—“ The girl stepped back in fear (—ting—) and Armsmaster belatedly realized he had assumed a two-handed combat stance. This was getting irritating.

“Okay,” he said again, marshalling his thoughts. He slowly crouched on one knee and set his halberd on the floor, ignoring his every instinct not to. “Your power is making me nervous. I did not mean to scare you.” The girl stepped back once more, but nodded fearfully.

“I think it’s worse when someone’s exposed to your power for longer periods of time,” Armsmaster continued, forcing the words past the tightness in his throat. “So I’m going to call the officers who came with me, and they will carry you out. We can go to the Protectorate, and we can figure it out. Does that sound good?”

The girl made a face. “I don’t want to go back to my mom,” she said.

“We can work it out once… once things aren’t so tense.”

“Okay,” she said.

Armsmaster touched his finger to his helmet again, then paused. “Do you have a cape name, by any chance?”

“No. I wasn’t r-really, uh, thinking about it.”

“That’s not a problem. Platoon Alpha, Armsmaster here. Please send in one squad armed only with foam launchers. Temporary cape name ‘Bellsong’ has agreed to be taken to the PRT. Her movements cause bell sounds which amplify fear or doubt, so you will gently carry her out for escort to HQ.” His heart was beating like a drum in his chest, and he distantly noticed that his hands were trembling. Every fiber of his body was screaming at him to fight or run away.

He was almost done, though. No need to… to attack.

He turned towards Bellsong.

“I’m going to sit down so that I don’t accidentally scare you again. Will you sit down, too?” He demonstrated by sitting on his halberd. His instincts screamed at the grievous tactical error he was committing, but he shoved them down. Told himself it was the Master power.

The girl nodded and collapsed into a sitting position, cross-legged. He winced at the bell toll that accompanied the motion.

“Oh, right. Bellsong, please use this.” He took out a thin mask with a stretchy string connecting both ends. “The PRT takes secret identities seriously, so it’s a good idea to wear a mask.” He tossed the mask into her lap with an easy underhand throw.

The girl fumbled with the mask and fit it around her head, just as five PRT officers rounded the corner. They were unarmed, as requested, other than two wearing foam launcher backpacks.

“Glad you made it,” Armsmaster said with a smile.

~~~

“Am I being detained?”

Sean McKenzie sighed. That was the first thing the blond girl who had shot Cpl. Jin earlier had said once she was un-foamed. With a sly smile, too. She probably knew exactly what she was doing.

“No, Miss...?” The girl just glared at her, arms crossed, refusing to provide her name. “Miss. We just need to make sure you’re uninjured and that you have a legal carry permit for your firearm.”

“Aren’t you going to keep me around? I did shoot one of your officers, you know. Really well, too. I’d know.” She flashed a grin at her. Was she actually proud of it?

“Yes, you did shoot one of my squad members—Corporal Jin. She said that it, quote stung like a motherfucker, end quote. But you were also under a Master effect, and the PRT usually doesn’t punish people for being victims. So just show me your carry license and you can leave.”

“I guess,” she said, looking disappointed. She fished out a plastic card from her purse. Sean looked at the picture, comparing it to the girl, and held the card at an angle to check that it had the holographic watermarks.

“Okay then, Ms. Wilbourn, I think you’re good to go.” Sean waved Jin over, who handed the girl her Glock 17 with magazine separated and chamber empty. “We would appreciate it if—”

“Not interested,” she said. “I don’t feel like taking hours out of my precious time just to give you folks a useless statement. Um, not to say that your time isn’t precious. Just mine is more.” She got up and dusted herself off.

“Would you like to—” Sean was interrupted yet again and felt mounting irritation.

“No thanks, I have my own doctor. Cheers, officers.” The girl gave Sean a half-hearted wave and managed to hurry to her car without seeming hurried.

Jin snorted in amusement. “Well, she’s annoying.”

“Occupational hazard, I guess.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks Pita and Pericardium for their valuable feedback.
> 
> Temporary cape name "Bellsong," who would probably choose the name Emmireh if she ever decided to be a full cape, was borrowed from Pita's story Crucible. I hear it is a good story, though I haven't read it because I don't know the ME fandom. If you know Mass Effect go take a gander at it.


	3. PRT Story 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The great bureaucracy machine of the PRT turns evermore. Sean fills out paperwork, and Armsmaster talks to Bellsong.

The mystery cape didn’t look much like a villain at all, Sean thought.

She looked so small, so frail. Which, perhaps, was a given when compared to Officer Bernard, who was just shy of six feet tall and fit. But Bellsong felt smaller than Officer Jay, too, and he was five foot five. Maybe it was because of the gear—the bullet-resistant PRT armor was surprisingly bulky—or how she was being held by Jay in a bridal carry.

Or maybe it was the way she seemed to shrink into herself.

She noted that Bellsong tinkled faintly whenever Jay took a step.

Sean glanced at Saffins, who was being quiet. She executed the gesture sequence for a private channel.

“Penny for your thoughts, Saff—Sofiya?” Just like capes tended to stick to cape names when in costume, it was customary for PRT officers to call each other by their last name when it was time to get serious, so to say. She wasn’t asking Sofiya that question as her commanding officer, so she had decided to use her first name.

Her visor turned towards Sean’s, then back at the ground as the whole squad slowly picked their way between mounds of containment foam that hadn’t been fully dissolved yet. Leftover containment foam wasn’t a priority for washing away, and her squad, Squad Nine, was ordered to return to HQ with Bellsong and de-suit, debrief and take the rest of the day off. They did have a casualty, after all, though Jin was adamant that it was just a bruise.

“I felt pretty bad about shooting a civilian,” she said at length. “Even if it’s just rubber bullets. I signed up because I couldn’t stand to see the gangs fucking up my town, you know?”

Sean nodded, then said, “Yeah.” She wasn’t sure Sofiya would’ve seen her nod.

“Three out of three gangs in Brockton Bay agree, let’s shit on the black people.” She made a short noise that might’ve been a laugh.

Sean snorted despite herself.

“At least the capes, like Rune and Hookwolf and Kaiser, they signed up for this life. And the rank and file, the kind that go out in the street and rough up kids. We don’t need to pull our punches them _them_. But that girl I shot at? She didn’t sign up for this. She was just in the right place at the wrong time, out grocery shopping or some shit.”

“She _did_ have a gun,” Sean pointed out.

Sofiya shook her head. “It’s not the same. Everyone has the right to keep themselves safe, and if they do it by buying a gun? Good for them.”

“She shot Alexis. She might’ve shot you, too.”

“I know.” She was quiet for a bit. “I know.”

She didn’t say anything more.

Sean gave Sofiya a pat on the shoulders then dropped back to talk to Jay and Bellsong.

“How’s it—” Oh, right. Sean considered switching her comms to external, but instead tugged her helmet off and ran her gauntleted hand over her braided blond hair. “How’s it going, Officer Jay?”

“All’s clear on the western front,” Jay transmitted through his external speakers. “Was ten twenty-four earlier but payload’s secured and in transit, and we’ll be ten-nineteening by oh eight hundred hours, Squad Nine Actual. Over.”

Sean gave Jay a look, though it was hard to do through his opaque, reflective visor. It felt more like she was giving herself a look. “Nobody talks like that in the PRT,” she said dryly, “Sure you don’t need that MSP after all? Specifically, extended isolated quarantine.”

“Anything but that, Sarge,” he said, drawling the last word. Bellsong giggled. “In my defense, _I_ talk like that. I’m my own exhibit number one.” He raised his chin. Sean rolled her eyes. She addressed Bellsong, instead.

“How’re you doing, Bellsong? Officer Jay treating you well?”

The cape nodded.

“Good. We’re going to take you to the PRT van we came in, and you’ll ride along with us to the PRT headquarters, in downtown. Have you been?”

“No,” she said. “I’ve been to the Rig, though.”

“Hah. Armsmaster would probably have wanted you taken to the Rig, but he had to go back on patrol. So you’re stuck with boring old us.”

“That’s okay,” Bellsong said.

“I resent that,” Jay said. “You and Bernard are the boring ones.”

Sean ignored him. “Are you feeling okay? I noticed you’re fidgeting.” She was practically wringing her hands, in fact.

“I’m… I’m good. I get restless, that’s all. And if I bounce my leg or drum my fingers or something, my power will happen and then everyone will be hurt.” Her voice hardened. “I don’t want to do that.”

“Do you think you want to become a Ward?” Jay asked.

Bellsong thought about it.

“I wish I could just go back to before I had powers,” she said. “But… I don’t think that happens. So, maybe.”

“It’s a good deal. I mean, you have to do like ten tons of paperwork, but they pay you, you get friends, and make you costumes.” Jay smirked. “Not that it’s worth doing all that paperwork for that. And having to go to school, too.”

Sean sighed. “And here I was thinking you were actually doing a pitch.”

“This is definitely a pitch. Besides, only villains don’t go to school. Would you want to be a villain, Sergeant?”

“Think you should shut up, Jay,” Jin said through her own speakers.

Ahead, Saffins tugged the door open to the PRT van that they came in.

“Alright,” Sean said, psyching herself up. “Bellsong, Armsmaster said your power happens when you touch something?”

“Yes. When I hit anything, or walk or run, it makes a sound. And if you hear the bell sound, you get scared.” The slim Asian girl warily glanced up at Jay. “I could try to walk really softly, if Officer Jay puts me down.”

“That sounds like a plan. Jay, if you will?” Sean stepped away to give Bellsong some space.

“Kay.” With a grunt, Jay bent his knees and slowly set Bellsong on the floor, accompanied by a pair of softly _ting_ ing bells.

Despite her half-face mask, Sean could see that Bellsong’s face was tight with apprehension. The cape took a shaky breath, then padded towards the open truck. The sounds weren’t too bad—they made her hair stand up, but she didn’t feel the urge to hide in a corner.

“Seems good,” Sean said encouragingly. Bellsong slowly climbed into the van, which set off a slightly more echo-y series of bell sounds, and settled into the seat nearest to the exit. Jin helped her with the seatbelt, and Sean took one last look around the grocery store parking lot. The other two squads were unfoaming the rest of the civilians, as well as taking reports and cleaning up foam. It was a relief that her squad wasn’t on cleanup duty today. Maybe one of the few perks of being rapid response. She fit her helmet back on her head and climbed in.

~~~

All military, paramilitary, and governmental organizations were fueled by paperwork. Some people joke that you can’t even sneeze in an alphabet soup organization without filling out some form or another in triplicate.

The PRT was no exception, and paperwork blood filtered through the halls of the Brockton Bay headquarters, feeding off of the energy of countless workers and providing information to where it was needed, more or less. Usually more.

A slip of paper separated from the great pulsing arteries of the System and found its way to a certain Parahuman Response Team Squad Leader.

~~~

Someone sharply rapped on the door frame three times—the frame, because squad rooms didn’t have doors, instead opening out onto a side-hall that twisted one more time left before rejoining the main halls. Alexis Jin, Corporal, looked up from the rifle she had just started cleaning. Which started with removing the magazine and opening the chamber to make sure it’s empty.

The round tinkled on the table.

“Who is it?” She poked her head out of the room. A man with neat brown hair dressed in slacks, a shirt and a tie gave a friendly wave. The name _Ryan_ came to mind, but she wasn’t sure enough about it to call him that. Why couldn’t civilian PRT employees have highly visible name tags?

“Hey. Just got a message for, uhh—”He glanced at the slip of paper he was holding.

“Sergeant McKenzie?” Alexis looked at the paper too. It had a name and five lines of text, preceded by what looked like form codes. She scrunched up her face in disgust. “And that’s paperwork, right?” she asked quietly.

“Yeah,” he said with a sheepish smile. “Sorry, I’m always bringing paperwork. It’s my job.”

“And it’s not mine, so there’s that.” Jin took the slip. Possibly-Ryan nodded and left. She went back into the room and tapped her squad leader on the shoulder. “Hey, Sean?”

Sean turned, then sighed, looking at the slip in Jin’s palm.

“Paperwork,” she said flatly.

“Yup. Have fun.”

~~~

All five members of Squad Nine were out of their armor, now. And filling out paperwork. Electronic paperwork, but still paperwork.

The PRT had laptops for this purpose, heavy, bulky things that were the kind you could drop ten feet into water, run over with a car and still finish your form. The PRT also had hundreds of them spare, for the unlikely possibility that someone managed to break one.

Sean McKenzie, as squad leader, had the dubious privilege of needing to fill out five forms instead of three. The three forms that everyone in her squad had to fill out were, respectively, the Post-Combat Gear Inventory, the Mission Report, and the Parahuman Capabilities Report. The two that Sean had to complete in her capacity as squad leader were the Tactical Report and the Squad Member Commendation & Reprimands Sheet. Its official acronym was ‘SMCRS’, but her fellow squad leaders tended to call it ‘snickers,’ as in “Have you completed your snickers?” to which the answer was usually no. She could’ve sworn she’d heard Director Piggot call it that once, too, though nobody believed her when she claimed to have.

The Post-Combat Gear Inventory was a fairly short form. Compare the list of gear you came back with to the list of gear you left with, then write a brief explanation of how it was used or lost. It helped the pencil-pushers—or the logistics department, in more polite terms—keep track of, well, inventory. Sean hadn’t personally used any ammo, so it was simple enough to fill out.

The Mission Report was a straightforward form. Other than some boilerplate—the usual, officer number, rank, name, date, commander—it was simply a large text field in the PDF file. It was supposed to be a ‘comprehensive but concise, complete but not exhaustive’ report, whatever that meant, and there weren’t many rules surrounding it other than to be truthful and making sure you wrote a decent amount.

The Parahuman Capabilities Report was _almost_ like the Mission Report, but you were supposed to write about what kind of feats the capes involved did. It was generally considered a useless form, because it was more productive to discuss what a cape did in the post-mission debriefing meeting—usually one to two hours after a mission. Things someone else might mention could remind you of this new thing that one cape did, and reports of cape power interactions had saved many an officer from serious injury. None of her squad had fought Bellsong, but they did see her effects on the civilians firsthand, as well as how she acted and used her power afterwards. Sean frowned as she remembered how timid she had been, and how she couldn’t turn off her quite obvious power. She wouldn’t get much of a civilian life, and her power would wreak havoc on a team’s dynamic. Especially the Wards. Teenagers weren’t the best at putting gut feeling aside to do their jobs.

Sean drummed her fingers on the laptop keyboard’s backlit keys. Could Bellsong even have friends?

She added a note to the PCR form about Bellsong possibly becoming isolated due to her power. Technically it was against regulation, but… there had to be a point where _being_ _human_ overruled protocol.

She saved the form and opened the next one.

Tactical Reports were basically Mission Reports but at a higher level, the point of view that a squad leader was supposed to have, and the snickers form (SMCRS) was four questionnaires and an empty box to note distinctions and other observations. Corporal Alexis Jin’s form got a check in “Injured, Field.” She also wrote that Corporal Sofiya Saffins might need to see a therapist for her guilt over her actions in the field in the free response field, and a recommendation that Officer Jay take supplementary foam dispenser training. Not knowing the effective and maximum ranges of the most important weapon in the entire PRT arsenal was, she thought, a very large flaw that had to be corrected. It had nothing to do with her being vindictive about Jay telling the new cape the PRT was full of bureaucracy.

…Which it was, but he wasn’t supposed to be telling vulnerable, impressionable new capes that. Finally done with all her forms, she sent them off into the official form reception system.

Sean was incredibly ready for a nice hot meal in the cafeteria. She closed her laptop and got up.

~~~

Seventeen newly filled-out forms filtered their way through the System.

Although there were five copies of the three common forms, a lot of their content overlapped. _Someone_ had to read through them side-by-side, really understand their contents instead of mechanically processing them, and finally synthesize them into one beautiful report for permanent storage in the System. And that someone was Michael Ericson.

One Mission Report to rule them all, Michael thought with a touch of wryness, one Parahuman Capability Report to bind them.

He studied the Mission Reports spread across the two large flat screen monitors he had. He’d spent enough time with the reports of Squad Nine that he could guess who had written each without checking the name.

For example, the one written entirely in lowercase was without a doubt Officer Jay’s, who insisted on submitting Mission Reports, but not other forms, like that. It was technically acceptable, as the rules did not specify one had to capitalize. It was assumed to be a given.

Officer Jay was better known amongst the PRT analysts, though, for his lack of last name. Or first name. The system, by default, required all officers to have two names, first and last.

Of course, the problem was that “Jay” was Officer Jay’s entire legal name.

Faced with choosing between revamping the entire PRT officer database, or placing a period in the “First Name” field and “Jay” in the “Last Name” field, the choice was obvious. As for which field to put the period in: many places where an officer’s name was used, the system automatically displayed their rank and last name. So that was how Officer Jay’s PRT nametag had come to read ‘. Jay’; though the last time he had seen him in uniform, he had scratched off the period.

Michael rubbed his chin as he scrolled through the reports. It would be ever so slightly more effort to compile the final Mission Report today, because Sergeant McKenzie had split the squad into two—to cover more ground in the wide open parking lot, according to her Tactical Report—and thus there were two threads, two points of view to cover. But in the end, this mission was relatively short and ‘clean,’ with few complications: only one cape, who was not hostile, and civilians who mostly stayed put and got foamed.

As the attached analyst to Squad Nine, Michael was tasked with processing the Mission Reports, Parahuman Capability Reports, and the Tactical Report. The Post-Combat Gear Inventory report was forwarded directly to Logistics, and the SMCRS—while Michael would never use the term the officers tended to use, the full name of the SMCRS form was, admittedly, quite a mouthful—was handed over to the Health & Wellness department, so he never saw those.

It helped to have all three combat reports in front of him, to get the whole picture of what happened in the field. There had been a brief period of time when the PRT attempted to gain efficiency by having one analyst process the Mission Reports, one the Parahuman Capability Reports, and one the Tactical Reports. Michael had been one of the many analysts who had protested, loudly and strenuously.

It had barely lasted a week before the higher-ups reverted this decision.

Roughly thirty minutes later, Michael had finished his three much cleaner, precisely worded and edited versions of the fifteen submitted combat forms—as well as an edited version of the two leadership forms from the Sergeant—and had sent them off into the System.

The note that had been attached to the Sergeant’s Parahuman Capabilities Report was the last problem he had to solve. He supposed that psychology information technically fell into the category of intel covered in a parahuman’s file, under “personality & behavior,” but he had a hunch this info would be important for anyone wishing to recruit this… _Bellsong,_ name provisional. Was there a Bellsong recruitment file? No, there was not. Michael started one and added the contents of that note in, then sent a link to the file to both the Director and Armsmaster, flagged as priority.

Work done, he got up, drained the rest of his coffee, and went for a smoke break.

~~~

“Director.” Armsmaster nodded to Director Emily Piggot, stepping into her office.

“Armsmaster,” she acknowledged. The Director shifted some papers around. It was mostly for show, he knew. She always had finished reading the relevant paperwork _before_ anyone ever got to see her. “Report?”

Her raised tone was a small display of respect, considering that the Director outranked him.

“I’ve just finished debriefing Squads Three, Nine and Eighteen,” he began. “The operation was entirely routine, aside from two points.”

The Director raised an eyebrow at ‘routine.’ According to her, there was no such thing as routine. To Armsmaster, though, routine was a good word to describe ordinary operations. Efficient. She didn’t comment, though.

“One. The civilian who opened fire on Corporal Alexis Jin of Squad Nine while being affected by Bellsong’s Master effect was identified by Sergeant Sean McKenzie as Lisa Wilbourn, according to her pistol carry permit. She had what was described as ‘uncanny aim.’ Upon examination of Corporal Jin’s armor, four rounds had impacted within the diameter of a dollar coin, and the armor plate was nearly entirely shattered. The weapon used was a Glock 17, nine millimeter rounds. As you know, under normal circumstances PRT body armor is nearly impervious to small arms fire, but precisely firing upon the same area severely stressed its protection. Ms. Wilbourn has declined debriefing as well as medical aid. Quote, ‘I have better things to do with my time.’”

“I presume you are suggesting that she is a cape?” The Director’s tone was slightly south of frosty, which Armsmaster interpreted as _restrained doubt_.

“Our analysts say that there are very few non-parahuman sixteen year old women in the United States that have this degree of aim with a pistol. I suggest that we open a file under her name as a person of interest, and add this incident as a note.” Opening files on “persons of interest” was a contentious topic with the public, and when faced with scrutiny over the matter, the PRT’s compromise was that all such POI files be cleared directly by the relevant branch’s Director. Armsmaster personally thought that it was a silly ‘solution’ that simply made everything more cumbersome without actually changing anything. POI files were opened as usual, but had to be rubberstamped by the Directors every time.

The Director inclined her head. “Reasonable. Number two?”

“Bellsong, the parahuman that caused this incident, has agreed to stay in PRT custody for the moment. She is a fourteen year old, newly triggered Master, Striker, minor Shaker who causes fear and paranoia-inducing sounds on touch. She cannot disable her power, and therefore cannot have a civilian identity.”

“What are the complications?” Armsmaster reflected on how, despite her reputation as a parahuman skeptic, he and the Director had good rapport. She knew that he knew the standing policy for the PRT was to suggest membership to new triggers. She also knew that he had only brought the cape up because there was a problem with that. They wasted fewer words this way. It always felt strange, though, to have this degree of coordination with someone.

“Quite a few,” he said. “Bellsong’s power inherently drives teams apart. Walking or running is enough to trigger the Shaker aspect of her power, and will cause any listeners to experience fear, paranoia or simply be on edge. If she actually strikes someone, they, and people nearby, will feel intense paranoia and isolation. This is not a recipe for team cohesion, especially among teenagers.”

The Director nodded. “And we cannot relocate her.” Her words were still cold, but Armsmaster felt that the implied tone was _familiar indifference_.

It was a dance, he thought. A dance she and he knew the steps perfectly to, knew the rhythm and the beat, knew each other’s quirks, preferences, mistakes.

“We believe that part of trigger was the threat of being removed from Brockton Bay. She is currently mentally stable, though afraid of her power. Obviously, this will not be the case if we suggest she be relocated.”

“Do you think it is possible to alleviate her condition?” With surety. A question asked for politeness, when she already suspected the answer.

A flawless dance, a masterpiece of two—except Armsmaster was fairly sure the Director positively _loathed_ him. And every other cape he had seen her talk to, for that matter. Hero and villain alike. He, in turn, did not exactly _like_ the Director. But they worked well together. And he respected her.

“I believe something could be done. I am highly confident that, at worst, she would still be able to adjust to the Wards. At best, she may even be able to fully reintegrate into society, have a normal life.” Armsmaster considered himself one of the most versatile Tinkers in the United States, humility be damned. He was also able to occasionally collaborate with Dragon, who was definitively the greatest Tinker in the world. Besides, she tended to have somewhat of a soft spot for those capes who were victims of their powers.

He already had some ideas for Bellsong, ranging from a hovering chair so that she didn’t have to walk—which was admittedly subpar as ideas went—to an active noise-cancelling device. Dragon was likely to have more.

“You’ll be handling the pitch?”

Armsmaster nodded. “I already have built a rapport with Bellsong, both at the scene and as she was settling in. I am also the head of the city’s Protectorate, which allows me greater freedom for her terms of Ward membership.”

“Excellent.” Director Piggot’s steely eyes met his. She didn’t need to say that she expected results. He didn’t need to say that he would produce them.

Armsmaster nodded once, sharply pivoted and left.

~~~

The doors to the Master Stranger Protocol-compliant holding cells on the fifth basement of the PRT were classified as ‘Very Important’ doors. This meant that two cameras connected to facial and silhouette recognition systems faced this side of the door, there were weight and heat sensors studded in the walls, and that the door itself was protected with two factor security methods. First, Armsmaster had to input the password. Second, he had to present a physical, digitally signed cryptographic key, impossible to duplicate. There were no biometrics involved, because, as the PRT Field Manual 07—better known as the _Master/Stranger Protocols_ —said, ‘ _Biometrics are identification, not security_.’

Also, at least one PRT department had suffered a breach when Bonesaw had ‘borrowed’ the eye and thumb of a PRT Director.

Armsmaster’s crypto key was in his halberd, of course.

The outer door slid open frictionlessly. He stepped in and waited for the inner door to cycle.

The entire MSP Cell Wing was kept at a lower air pressure than the outside, and the air constantly pumped out through a high grade particulate filter. Its practicality versus Master or Stranger threats was dubious, but it was a technique often used in medical research centers, and wasn’t too difficult to implement. Minimal cost with potentially high payoff was, in the PRT’s book, a win. You never could know when you needed a filtered negative pressure room to prevent an airborne particle-based Stranger from escaping.

He strode down the hallway and took two lefts and a right, following his visor HUD’s directions. This cell had one guard in front of it. This was non-regulation, of course—cells needed to be watched by at least two guards on site, with at least one guard manning a camera off-site—but the cape was not strictly a prisoner. The door was open, too. Technically violating the greatest rule of facility security (“ _All doors must stay closed **AT ALL TIMES**. An open door is a door that might as well not exist._ ”)… but to hell with that. Bellsong was not a prisoner. She was only being held in the isolation cells because they had soundproofing built in. It helped with her anxiety.

Armsmaster rapped on the frame of the cell’s door twice, then walked in. This time, he had left his halberds at the weapons rack in front of the door. He would not make the same mistake twice. He also left his helmet there, leaving him unmasked save for a cloth hood that covered his head and upper face, exposing his eyes. Eye contact helped a lot with making people feel at ease, and the hood was sufficiently similar to his typical helmet that he would be identifiable.

“Hello, Bellsong,” he said, smiling.

The girl, still wearing the flimsy mask he had given her, jumped up from her seat at the table where a PRT laptop was sitting.

“Hi!” she said brightly. Then winced and mumbled a sorry, as her sudden movement caused a series of bell chimes. Armsmaster waved it off, shuddering slightly. The motion should be invisible under his armor.

“Have you been holding up fine? I know these holding cells aren’t the most comfortable.” He looked at the off-white walls and the sparse furniture. The entire cell was one room, and even the toilet wasn’t separate. At least there was a desk, chair, laptop and clock brought in, for her. Bellsong followed his gaze and shrugged.

“It’s creepy,” she said, “but it’s okay because I have the internet. Also, I can’t hurt anyone like this. I did some gymnastics after lunch. The guard brought me gym mats.” She waved at the blue mats stacked neatly against the far wall.

“I’m glad to hear,” Armsmaster said. “Have you thought about the Wards?” Bellsong cringed, but Armsmaster kept talking. “Assuming your power wasn’t an issue. Would you like to be a hero?”

The girl shifted uneasily, possibly subconsciously. She hugged herself tightly. It sounded like she was a wind chime. Was she…? Yes, she was tapping her side with a finger. Armsmaster stood up slightly straighter.

“If I could…” Bellsong trailed off. Armsmaster nodded patiently. “A hero…”

Half a minute passed, with Bellsong looking off to the side while fidgeting and shifting. The tiny sounds were making Armsmaster nervous, but he knew he had the willpower to withstand just a little exposure.

Exposure time, huh. He was uncomfortably reminded of the Simurgh, and immediately shoved that thought deep down.

“Maybe,” Bellsong finally said. “I think it won’t be. Won’t be too bad. Will I get to stay in, uh, Brockton Bay?” Her voice trembled. It was likely a sore topic for her. Triggering was a … trying experience.

“I think so,” Armsmaster said. “Your mother was involved in you getting your powers, and your father had a house here, which would go to you. The PRT may be able to gain legal custody from your mother, in which case you could stay in Brockton Bay.” He smiled as he saw the girl’s expression immediately brighten.

“That’s good,” she said. “Though I think I might still want to see my mom. Sometimes.”

“It would be difficult to _not_ see her, because of visitation rights issues,” Armsmaster replied, then caught himself. “Legal stuff,” he amended.

“I know what visitation is.”

“Sorry.” He chuckled. “Now, about your power…” It was almost comical, seeing her wilt again. If this situation wasn’t so _real_ to her. He changed tack. “Do you know who Dragon is?”

“Isn’t she, like, the best Tinker in the world? She made the dragon suits, and runs the Guild, and made the Birdcage where the bad—the bad villains... go.”

Armsmaster spoke up quickly to divert her attention again. “I know her personally, and she promised to help me build something to help you.”

“Really?” The hope in her voice was palpable.

“Really. I already have some ideas, though some are”—Armsmaster coughed into his fist—“ _better_ , than others.” His hover-chair idea was sounding sillier to him by the moment. It was good that he did not actually mention it to anyone save Dragon.

“I… It would be great if I could be normal. Normal-ish.” She chewed on her lip. “I never thought I wanted to go to school before, you know? Or go to gym practice. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t _crave_ it so much.”

Armsmaster smiled again. “And I imagine that being knocked out of your routine would feel weird. I wouldn’t last a day without my regular training.”

Bellsong giggled. But didn’t make any bell noises. Now that she was less distracted, she was obviously trying hard to clamp down on her movement. It felt like she was being unnaturally still, even.

Armsmaster cleared his through. He said his next words in a more formal voice. “Bellsong. Would you like to be a Ward?” He extended his hand.

She looked at him. He suspected he knew what she was thinking—could she dare to hope?

Bellsong hesitated for a moment. Then she nodded.

“Yes,” she said.

She shook his hand.

The bell-sound that accompanied it sounded a touch less baleful than usual.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much thanks to frustratedFreeboota and tearlessNevermore for beta-ing.


	4. Spun Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Taylor is accidentally caught in a fight between an assassin and a vigilante on a rooftop in King’s Row. Overwatch/Worm.

What does one do when cast out of the Garden of Eden into a cruel, dead world?

Find religion, apparently.

The metaphor sort-of broke down, Taylor Hebert supposed, when Eden had three roving angels that sought to destroy everything she held dear, and the outside world was forsaken by whatever God made those angels. Could you really call something forsaken if it was preferable to being blessed?

She swung her legs idly on the edge of the roof. It was night, and the air chilly, and the metaphor was taken so far that it had splintered into silliness.

Here, there weren’t any Endbringers. There was nothing she recognized, no PRT, no Protectorate, and Brockton Bay didn’t even exist. Hell, there weren’t any parahumans. But there was Tinkertech, except this Tinkertech wasn’t actually Tinker-made. And was sold at corner stores for fifty pounds. The tiny pulse pistol she had bought sat in easy reach of her right hand. It was a useful thing, spitting out little “kinetic pulse pellets” that conveniently happened to be entirely non-lethal. Like pepper spray in gun form.

She was leaning against a tall brick chimney that had been installed near the edge of the roof.

There was chanting coming from below, loud enough that even her human ears picked it up. The crowd gathered in the square below her was there to listen to words of a walking, talking, religiously-leading robot. A… an omnic. It was weird to think of a machine as something that could talk and think. Weirder still that people listened. They were fervently chanting his name.

It had been a month now, since she had found herself on this Earth whatever-the-letter-should-be, and she was losing hope. Taylor missed her friends, and she felt crushing guilt that she abandoned her city when it needed her to protect its civilians from gangs like the Fallen or the Teeth. She was Skitter, one of the crime lords of Brockton Bay, and that title came with a duty.

She had heard that a robot monk from the Order of the Iris would be giving a speech near where she had a hotel room, so she might as well come listen. Maybe she would rediscover her hope. Admittedly, the philosophical musings of a robot was hardly something that would help her return home, but Taylor was reaching the end of her options.

Her bugs picked up the sharp crack of wood on bone from two or three rooftops away.

Taylor whipped her head towards the sound, but it was nearly impossible to make anything out with her eyes. She went back to looking at the crowd below, instead relying on her bugs. They told her of the distinctive clack clack that high heeled shoes made when you ran, followed by the sound of more fighting. Some flies landed on the mysterious high-heel wearer so that she could keep track of her.

She suddenly moved to the rooftop next to Taylor’s with a jerk that almost shook off the flies. A mayfly bumped into a cold, hard surface—a gun? Taylor directed some more mayflies to feel out the weapon. Definitely a gun, probably one of those two-handed rifles instead of a pistol. The owner of said gun broke into a dash which dislodged most of her bugs, and smoothly took out another one of the security guards who had been patrolling the roofs the last hour.

Taylor considered her options. She didn’t have her mask, though she was wearing her spider-silk suit under her street clothes. She could leave, but that would probably end in her being chased down. The woman was fast, and had some way of jumping between roofs that she didn’t. It would come down to fighting, or convincing her that she wasn’t worth the risk to take down. She had some advantages over those poor guards that probably had broken bones and concussions by now, though: awareness, and her power. On the other hand, all she had for a weapon was the non-lethal pulse pistol, and her power. Taylor had the feeling that the other person wasn’t carrying a rifle-sized, rifle-shaped non-lethal pea shooter. Her suit was bullet-resistant, but bullets would still bruise her and maybe fracture some bones, and anyways the other person seemed nimble and athletic enough to be mistaken for a cape, if this were not a world without any.

There was another person running up the stairs towards the roof. Was she backup for the woman? Another point of evidence towards not engaging in combat. It was silly to jump straight into a fight without knowing the capabilities of everyone involved.

The woman jumped to her roof.

Taylor needed to show confidence.

“You going to fight me?” She felt a faint sense of déjà vu as she called out to the woman. The woman hesitated.

“Maybe,” she replied. The words sounded like she was smirking. Sneering, even.

Taylor stretched, and tried to make herself sound lazy. Quietly confident, but unwilling to bother herself with nuisances like the lady. Lisa had told her, once, that getting into the mindset was important when trying to fake it. “I wouldn’t if I were you,” she said. “It won’t turn out well.”

“For you?”

“No.”

The woman was silent. Her mayflies told Taylor that she had swung her rifle up and was holding it with one hand. Not an aggressive stance. She let herself relax a little bit.

“Are you going to fight me?” The sneer, again. Though she sounded… amused? Amused, now. “After all, what I am about to do is hardly legal.”

Taylor thought about it.

“No, I don’t think so. And I really don’t care.” Not her world, not her fight. She was briefly reminded of the Travelers.

The woman snorted. “So be it, then. Do not interrupt me and perhaps I will let you live, after my job here is done.”

“You’re not good enough to kill me.” Stated as fact. The tactical part of Taylor told her it was probably a toss-up either way. She was highly confident that Blue would die, but she wasn’t so confident that she wouldn’t suffer the terminal condition that is a bullet through the head in the process.

She didn’t reply, and Taylor glanced at her. She was tall and incredibly thin, built like a gymnast, perhaps. She had an elaborate Tinkert—an elaborate set of headgear, a long, black rifle with red highlights, and a skintight outfit. Most striking, though, was the fact that her skin was tinged an unhealthy blue, like someone who was frostbitten all over their body. Honestly, Taylor was curious about how that happened, but now wasn’t the time. Maybe she could search about Blue on the internet later.

Blue was entirely focused on the crowd below, now. Crouching on one knee, she did something to her gun and hidden components sprung out while others retracted, turning it into something that looked more like a sniper rifle. Taylor raised an eyebrow.

“Planning on, uh, shooting someone?”

“Yes and no,” the woman said. “One usually uses a gun to shoot people.” Her headgear snapped down over her eyes. “But I plan to shoot something. I’m sure you know that omnics aren’t people.” She sighted down the scope.

Taylor shrugged, then remembered that Blue wasn’t looking at her.

“So they say,” she said instead. She wasn’t decided on the matter, yet, though the few she had interacted with had seemed more or less human. Should she stop her? Blue was about to commit an assassination. Or at the very least, destroy a machine. But she barely knew whoever Blue was going to shoot, nor was she confident she wouldn't be throwing her life away in the process. Was it worth it?

She wanted to say it was.

And maybe she would have said it was, two months ago when she was a new cape on the scene, naive and full of idealism about being a hero. But she’d changed.

Really, she would be lying to herself if she said she believed the omnic monk had answers to her problems. It just wasn’t worth it.

She watched Blue touch her finger to the trigger.

The girl who had been coming up the stairs zipped out of the roof access with a whoop and started shooting at Blue. Her two pulse pistols were obviously more powerful than Taylor’s dinky one, judging by the loud cycling noise they made, as well as the divots they dug out of the concrete roof. Blue rolled out of the way. Blue’s gun snapped back into its previous form and she fired at Zippy.

If she had known she would’ve been caught in a gunfight, Taylor would’ve brought ear protection. Her ears hurt.

Zippy dodged admirably well, she observed.

“Tryin’ to crash another party, luv?” Zippy said to Blue cheerily, in a pause between volleys.

Quipping? Definitely a ‘hero,’ whatever passed for one here.

Blue dodged around the chimney Taylor was sitting against, and shouted at her, “Help me!”

Taylor looked at her, confused.

Blue was smirking.

She fired a grappling hook at a chimney on the other side of the roof and let herself be pulled away, and Zippy did the strange zip thing Taylor had named her after and crossed the couple meters to the chimney instantly. Fuck.

“Hey, there’s two of you now!” Zippy didn’t hesitate to open fire and Taylor swore as she scooped up her pistol and rolled in one smooth motion. Her legs were grazed by Zippy’s pistol shots and stung. She sent the majority of her bugs at Zippy, trying to block her vision.

“I don’t want to—“ Her protest was cut off as Zippy zipped again and appeared three meters to the side of where she last was. “Fuck!” Taylor leapt for the roof exit but caught a flurry of pulse shots in her chest and fell flat.

She was growing tired of this. She sent the command to her bugs.

“That’s what you get for try—” Zippy’s taunt was broken off by a shriek. Pressing an arm to her bruised chest, Taylor looked up.

Zippy desperately swatted at her face, which was crawling with bugs. Flies, mosquitos, the odd dragonfly or two, and a spider that had been nesting nearby. More bugs made their way from the nooks and crannies of the roof onto her yellow skin-tight suit, as some of the bugs on her face crawled into her mouth. Taylor coughed wetly before fixing Zippy with a glare.

“Would you just listen when I’m trying to say something?” Taylor scooped up her tiny pistol, then limped over and kicked Zippy’s guns, abandoned on the floor, to the corner of the roof. “If you had fucking listened, you would have known that I am not with the blue lady—”

Zippy suddenly disappeared with a bright flash. Taylor closed her mouth. Her bugs had disappeared and reappeared scattered all over the rooftop. Vibrations detected by some cockroaches in the roof access stairwell told her where the girl had went. She was panting, doubled over and gagging. Taylor supposed she had been a tad overzealous when she had sent a fly into her throat. She walked over to the access.

“Look, now we can talk—” Taylor registered raised guns and instinctively dropped to the floor, barely avoiding another flurry of pulse shots. She had her guns back? Some bugs checked the corner they had been in and came up empty.

Zippy did her thing and appeared right in front of her and tackled her to the ground. Taylor decided not to swarm her this time. To try and talk.

She looked mad, though. Zippy made her pistols snap back into her gauntlets and grabbed Taylor’s jacket lapels and pulled her up. She opened her mouth to angrily say something.

Then the loud snap-crack of a sniper rifle report echoed through the night. Zippy’s head snapped towards the sound.

Ah, Taylor thought. Blue. She was on the roof adjacent to hers and had been quietly setting up to do what she came here to do in the first place. And Taylor had distracted Zippy.

“No… no!” The girl leapt up and zipped to the edge of the roof. She stood there, transfixed. Taylor heard screams.

She got up slowly and limped over. Zippy was still standing there, next to her, mouth gaping.

The robot leader—Mondatta, that was his name—was on the floor.

The girl turned and glared at Taylor.

“How the hell could you… Why—What do you…” She buried her fingers in her hair. “Arggghh!”

Taylor felt more than a little guilty at having been forced to attack Zippy, but also felt like she should defend herself.

“I’m not the one who killed her. Do I look like I have a rifle in my hands?” She raised both of her hands in the air, one loosely holding her pulse pistol. “Go after her.”

Zippy worked her mouth angrily, then poked Taylor in the chest right where it hurt. “It’s your fault, too,” she growled.

Before Taylor could reply, a grappling hook crushed her spider and Blue leapt across the gap between buildings.

“You!” Zippy said, rounding on her.

“Good work,” she purred. “I knew I could trust you.”

Taylor felt used. She felt stupid for not having somehow saw this coming. And she felt betrayed, somehow, by this person whose name she didn’t even know. Her bugs started buzzing.

Just before her bugs arrived, Blue snap-kicked Zippy off the roof. Taylor gaped.

Then she directed countless mosquitoes to descend on Blue. She made her flies crawl all over her face, and had some force themselves into her mouth and nose. The ants that Taylor had finally managed to get up here started biting at her exposed skin.

The sniper didn’t even flinch. She coughed weakly and grinned.

“Little girl,” she wheezed. “Talon will welcome you.”

The roar of a jet-black plane made itself known, though it was much quieter than it should’ve been. It was one of those transport types that had a rear-loading cargo bay.

Blue fired her grappling hook one last time and was pulled into the craft.

Taylor scowled and brought her pistol up to send a stream of pellets at the craft. The plane tilted slightly, and the pellets splashed against the exterior and dissipated. It angled towards the sky and was soon nothing more than another patch of night sky.

Taylor stared after it for a while more as hot exhaust washed over her in waves.

Then she walked down the stairs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Omega_93 I am terribly sorry to inform you that you are, in fact, the best beta


	5. Step One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A girl in CUI-dominated Korea gains powers. She soon finds herself on the run from Yangban enforcers.

I was only eighteen years old, but my life was over.

I bent over and retched again, even though nothing came up.

Five people, dead at my hands. Even if they were all jopok from the Central gang. I hadn’t even started with a weapon. I’d simply stolen theirs. It hadn’t felt as cool as it had looked in movies.

It was so easy to kill five people. Step zero, and this is a bit of an involved step, think, I want them all to die. Step one, pretend to stumble at the idiot with the illegal handgun, then fall the other way and let him shoot his friend in the chest. Step two, hook the gun out of his hand with a fancy cartwheeling kick, then (step three) shoot everyone else. The gun was heavier than I had expected.

It had felt like I’d not only been fed the instructions, but carefully taught the choreography, and all the dead people were actors anyways so it didn’t matter—except this was real, and I had powers, and I was going to be kidnapped by the Yangban and brainwashed and become someone entirely different and never see my parents or my sister again. They took strong powereds, I knew, and I didn’t want to risk the chance that they would consider mine as strong too.

I was panicking. I tried to think. I had killed people with a loud gun and people were going to be coming for me really quickly, so I needed to run—but I needed money to get away and I didn’t have nearly enough.

I found myself plucking the wallets from the corpses and taking their money. I somehow knew which bodies didn’t have money—the gun-guy was too poor for cash, apparently. I tried not to look too close at all the blood pooling on the asphalt, or their vacant eyes, staring up at the sky.

They were all dead, anyways. You can’t use money in hell.

In total, I had around two hundred thousand won, a mix of yellow fifty thousand bills and green ten thousand bills, enough to do… something. A cheap meal was four thousand won, so at least I wouldn’t starve. I could figure what to do with the money later. I shoved the still-hot gun into my backpack as I ran.

I didn’t want this, any of this. One hour ago, I’d been just another girl in the third year at Central High School, worrying about college entry tests and thinking about which of the dozen instant food choices to eat at the convenience store near home. After my lazy afternoon snack I would run off to an after-school academy to study for the rest of the evening, trying not to think of the Central gang that was slowly laying claim on the area. No, it wasn’t exactly a happy life, but it was better than being powered.

Having powers meant that you had to either join a gang or register your powers with the government. If you registered a power that they wanted, you got the honor of volunteering for the Yangban. And if you needed to get some sort of medical scan done at a hospital and they found you were powered but unregistered, you would be fined and questioned by the Yangban’s enforcers.

The jopok obviously didn’t need to register, but the idea of being one was disgusting. Why would I want to help the kind of people who would chase a high school girl through a good part of Seoul for god knows what horrible reasons? I had come up with plan after plan to try and escape them, but each one had been defeated one way or another until it had come to the alleyway, and my trigger. They had caused this to happen.

I felt like my heart was going to explode. My home was on a steep, high hill. Even walking up it was tiring on good days, and I was running. I wondered if I could use my power to make it easier.

—It only took a thought, but my pace evened out and I found myself going faster than I had before while somehow expending less effort. It was really useful. But I was still powered, and still a murderer. A vision of blood gushing from someone’s head swam across my vision.

With a swipe of my keycard, the lobby’s glass door slid open. I took the slow elevator up to the eleventh floor, twitching nervously as if it would stop at any moment and I would be arrested.

The elevator did stop, but on the floor where my family’s apartment was. I turned right and punched in the key code for the door.

Nobody was home. It felt so casual, so routine, that I could almost forget that I had a gun in my bag, and that I’d shot four people and watched five die.

I shed my school uniform. The blood wasn’t very noticeable on the dark green jacket, though I noticed that my white name tag had a couple drops on it. Lee Ji Min, it said. I ripped it off. Never liked my name, anyways. The grey skirt and black stockings could go into the closet, too. The whole uniform smelled faintly of smoke or chemicals, but hopefully nobody would look too closely. Or maybe it was coming from my hands. I put that thought out of my mind and pulled on something practical to run in—sweatpants, mostly.

What did I need to do? I needed to get out of Korea. I could try and catch a plane out, go to Busan and take a ferry to Japan, or make my way to northern Korea, cross the Duman River and try to make it through Russia. I need to pack my clothes.

I felt myself dump my textbooks, and pack some underwear, shirts, two pairs of jeans and more sweatpants. I blinked, surprised how little space it took up. My power was useful for more than murder, I was starting to realize.

Did I really want to go to Russia? Not only did that mean hours and hours of bus riding, I’d have to cross the Duman River, though I knew my power would help a lot. Then I would need to avoid the Chinese border guards and the Russian border guards, then travel through Russia.

On top of that, I didn’t even know any Russian. My mother tongue was Korean, and I was fluent in Chinese. For English, I only knew whatever they had taught us in school—so I could read, but I would rather not have a conversation in it.

A plane wouldn’t be a good idea, either. For one, it was pricy, and the thought of standing in line for security for an hour terrified me to no end. It wasn’t logical, but I wanted to keep moving.

What else did I need to pack? My phone charger. I didn’t need to pack my smartphone, because I always had it in my hands, or my bag. I needed my passport, too. I was guided to the far corner of my bed, where the green-bound booklet had lodged itself. I used my power and extracted the green-bound booklet from the far corner under my bed. Do I keep the gun? I hesitated.

No, but I should throw it away where my parents wouldn’t find it. Preferably before I got on the train to Busan, because I wasn’t sure they didn’t have metal detectors. I would take the ferry to Japan, and try to find a way to go to America. I had a power. I had options.

I looked around my room. It was pretty small, dominated by my bed. The dresser was built into the wall, and the desk was littered with makeup, eraser dust and a dozen loose pieces of paper.

I was sure that I would never see it again.

I closed the door to my room.

On the way out, I glanced at the china. There was a picture frame, maybe as big as my palm, face-down. I set it right. It was of my little sister Lee Sumin’s graduation from middle school, last year, and our parents. She looked just like me—ruler-straight black hair, more pretty than plain, with the same facial shape and Mom’s nose. And, unfortunately, Dad’s wispy eyebrows. Can’t win them all.

I was going to miss her a lot.

I felt a rising sensation in my chest, the kind that if I let rise all the way to my head I would start sobbing. So I tried my best to push it away, just standing there.

After a long while, I walked to the front door, and looked back one more time.

Then I heard the sound of my little sister slamming open the keypad. She typed the six digit password at a breakneck pace and pulled the door open. She looked at me curiously.

“Sumin-ah,” I said, choking.

“Unni?” She had been on the way back from high school, too. The simple term for older sister was enough to make me start crying.

“Sumin-ah,” I repeated, “Listen closely, mm? I have to go.”

“Where’re you going? Unni, what’s wrong?” She hugged me. I touched her head gently.

“I have to go, far away. Please, tell our parents not to call the police, mm? I’ll be fine, I promise. When I’m safe, I’ll tell you everything. I promise.”

She looked at me. I wasn’t entirely sure what she was thinking, or whether she would listen, but I trusted her to do whatever she thought was best.

“I got it,” she said. “Unni. Don’t—don’t…” She was crying, too. Sympathetically. Like if you saw your mom crying and starting tearing up, even if you didn’t know why. “Be safe,” she said, instead of whatever she had been thinking of.

I hugged her. “I’ll try.” I slipped my sneakers on, sniffling. I looked at her again, and said the greeting I usually said before going to school or to lessons at hakwons, private academies. “Gatda olkkeh.” Casual, informal. I’ll be back. I gave her a watery smile and turned away, wiping away tears.

“Jalga,” she said.

The door closed behind me.

~~~

By the time I made it onto the bus, I wasn’t crying anymore. My eyes were still puffy. The bus stop I went to was the one on the opposite side of the hill from my school. Opposite to the side where I had killed.

It felt strange that I could just… step onto a bus, when I had killed five people not too long ago. I was paranoid that someone would stop me. That some Yangban would suddenly appear and take me away. But none of the dozen people on the bus were interested in me at all. The bus driver barely acknowledged me as I tapped my transport card to the reader. The other passengers were mostly my age, and too interested in their phones to pay me any attention. I was glad I didn’t recognize any of them—it would’ve been awkward, to say the least. I found a seat at the back.

The blue bus would take me to Seoul Station in around twenty minutes, so I had time to think about my power. I asked it questions, and it gave me a plan to carry out, and let me carry it out. But I got only a sense of mist or fog, sometimes. For example, trying the question how do I get out of Korea? didn’t cause my power to activate. There was some sort of limit to it that I couldn’t quite figure out. I also learned that I didn’t need to start the plans it gave me. I could ask, how do I tap the shoulder of the guy over there, but decide not to start the plan that would let me do that.

The bus pulled up the six lane bus stop that was my destination. I absently tapped my transport card to the reader beside the rear door of the bus, out of habit. The modern glass façade of Seoul Station dominated the view, the three syllable name spelled out in large Korean letters with Chinese and English versions under it.

As I stood at the crosswalk, I glanced at the people around me. None of them looked like Yangban, but it would be silly to expect them to be so obvious. While I waited for the lights to change, I asked myself how to kill the person next to me, and the one next to him, and so on until I was satisfied I could defend myself no matter what happened. Knowing that I could kill everyone on this traffic island twisted my guts with tension—but I also felt safe, like I was surrounded by glass cups, not people who might be Yangban. I knew it wasn’t moral to be seriously considering how to kill people, but I felt like I had already crossed that line.

The light changed, and I walked.

Before I bought my KTX train ticket, I went into the discount store that was part of the station and purchased a cheap, tiny bag. I slipped the gun into the bag in the bathroom.

I only hesitated a little before dropping the whole thing into a trash can. A lot of the how do I kill this person plans involved the gun, so it made me feel less safe, but I couldn’t risk getting discovered with an illegal weapon on the train.

The ticket was fifty six thousand won. I had to show my citizen card to get it, but the lady at the counter kept her bored expression while printing out my ticket. The train would take two and a half hours to get to Busan, with only two stops in between, and left in twenty minutes.

I spent most of the time until the train running hypotheticals on passerby. Even though I had my power, I probably couldn’t kill powereds with my bare hands. And if someone was powered, they were probably Yangban. They could be jopok powereds, but it was a good idea to stay aware of them as well.

The people around me remained exceptionally murderable.

I could only relax once my train pulled out of the station and so there were no new people entering and leaving all the time. The seat next to me was empty, which suited me just fine. I watched the scenery pass. It felt like ages since I had been able to relax. But it had been less than two hours. I wondered if Sumi had told my parents about me yet, and whether they had listened to my request. I knew my mom’s first reaction would be to go to the police anyways, which wouldn’t help at all. I hoped Sumi would be able to convince her not to.

At the train’s second stop, an hour and thirty minutes later, someone boarded the train and sat in the seat next to me.

I couldn’t kill her.

I stared. She had reflective sunglasses and hair bleached a white-blonde in a high bun, and was dressed nicely in a cardigan and jeans, though for some reason she was wearing crocs. She was maybe about college age, and looked pretty much exactly how I expected a college student to look like. Twenty something years old. Maybe she was a musician, because she had put a violin case on the cargo storage shelves overhead. But I also noticed that she was toned—her arm muscles had stood out when she was storing her bag.

I tensed. How do I get away from her? worked—I was made aware of a series of steps.

She turned her head towards me. “What’re you looking at?” Her tone wasn’t unkind, and she was using the informal impolite tense—the same kind I used with my sister or friends. Familiar.

I started, and almost took the first step of my ‘run away’ plan. I felt my cheeks heat up. Having been caught staring was embarrassing, regardless of the fact that this woman might be Yangban or a jopok. Though she was too pretty to be jopok. Was that bias? Probably. I wondered what her eyes looked like.

Striking up a conversation with the person next to you might be faux pas, but so was ignoring them. I apologized politely, ducking my head.

Still in that casual tone, she continued, “The Yangban enforcers know about you.”

I made a noise that sounded like a choked gasp. It was getting harder to breathe.

She frowned. “I’m not a bad guy, you know.” She sounded mildly hurt.

She was either lying and was going to catch me when I let my guard down, or was telling the truth and would help me. I already knew I couldn’t kill her. If she really would help, I would be more likely to survive. If she wasn’t, I wouldn’t be any worse off. And besides, if she was going to arrest me, wouldn’t she have done it already? I decided to trust her, for now. Conditionally.

“What do I do?” I had that electric tingle of adrenaline all over my body. It was making me tremble. “The Yangban are actually coming for me?”

“No,” she said. “It’s the enforcers, not the Yangban. It’s different. Enforcers have less useful or flexible powers than Yangban, otherwise they’d be Yangban.”

“Are you powered too?” My voice was almost a whisper.

“Yes.” She grinned. “I haven’t told you my name yet, have I? The government calls me Haejim”—falling apart—“but my real name is Kim Jihyeon. You should call me unni.” She pulled out her smartphone and tapped at it, sending a message. “Let’s just say that I’m hard to hit and hit hard.”

“I’m Lee Jimin.” I looked out the window. We would be arriving in twenty minutes. “Do you have a plan?”

“You haven’t told me about your power.”

I paused. Did I really want to tell her? While I’d decided to trust her for now, I was leery about sharing information about what I could do. At least until I really knew she was trustable. “Why do you ask?” I said.

Her lips curled in amusement. “It’s going to be three of them versus three of us. You can count as the fourth if we know what you do, so we can plan for you.”

I felt sheepish. “Uh, it lets me figure out how to... kill people.”

Her eyebrows rose. “Is it always lethal, or…?”

I shook my head.

She pursed her lips. “It’s probably better not to kill anyone,” she said. “It’ll make the Yangban actually start coming after us, instead of sending enforcers.”

“Who’s us?”

“I don’t think we actually have a name…” She tapped her jaw in thought. “But we’re like a… an underground, maybe? We try to keep people out of the Yangban’s hands. Most of us are powered.”

I stared. If what she was saying was true… maybe I could find a way out after all. “How do you stay away from the Yangban?”

“We’re really good at staying underground.” She smiled. It was a non-answer, but I didn’t want to press. I turned back to the window. I heard her nails tap against her phone’s screen. “Alright, so here’s what you’re going to do…” She told me the plan.

It sounded a little reckless, but she assured me that we could pull it off, especially with my power. I just needed to get away from the station, and try to hold off the lizard-man. There would be three enemies and four of us, though one wouldn’t actually be in combat.

I was going to be in a fight. I felt the tingling and shortness of breath again. I could lose this one, and be killed… or captured.

The train was pulling into the station now.

Jihyeon-unni took down her violin case again and opened it to reveal weapons. I didn’t need to see to know that there wasn’t going to be an instrument inside.. A couple knives; two short swords made of bamboo, the kind used for kendo practice; and two collapsible batons. She gave me a baton and a knife. “You’ll do better with weapons, right?” She picked up a bamboo sword and another knife for herself and closed the case again. I noticed people staring, though I wasn’t worried about them.

We got up and stood before the door. Jihyeon pointed out the three powereds waiting: Dorongnyong, a bright green man-lizard thing clinging to a pillar; a boy sitting on a bench whose codename she didn’t know; and Sangeo-po, the older woman waiting in the center of the platform. All three of them had masks that covered their entire face, though they were wearing normal clothes.

“Shark pancake? Really?”

Jihyeon smirked. “I think it was supposed to be like the paper in sandpaper. She’s not good at names.”

She told me not to use the knife if possible—blood made Sangeo-po stronger. Dodge Dorongnyong’s blasts.

The door hissed open.

I jumped out the door. I need to run that way. I sprinted towards the end of the train.

There were shouts, and a boom. I felt myself jinking and dodging. I glanced back and saw that Dorongnyong had his arm stretched in my direction, shooting white bursts. Jihyeon-unni was nowhere in sight. The normal people were all running.

I leapt onto the tracks.

The KTX wasn’t a subway so there was no electrified rail, but I avoided stepping on the rails anyways, out of some misguided paranoia. I glanced to the left and saw Jihyeon jumping down from the roof of the train, holding the bamboo sword in her hand. It looked as if it’d been turned into metal, and the seams were glowing a bright white. How did she get on the roof of the train?

“Run!” She hopped off the train, falling three or four meters without any obvious discomfort, and took her own advice. I followed. We ran away from the station, towards the railyard. We entered the bright sun.

I looked back. Dorongnyong was ten meters away from us, but I couldn’t see Sangeo-po or the boy.

“Up!” Jihyeon jumped to the side and I felt my body lunge the other way. A strange red lump crashed down between us. I rolled into a crouch. My back felt bruised.

“You rat-bitches,” the mass growled. “Stop fucking running!” Was she surrounded in blood? She lashed out at me, her arm stretching further than it should have, but I was already a pace to the side.

There was a sharp crack, and the blood surrounding her exploded, splattered all over the floor. She whirled. Unni had struck her with her glowing bamboo sword, which was looking battered from just that one hit. She grinned. “Such fucking filthy language.”

My body jerked forward, dodging another blast from Dorongnyong. I was in range of him again. I need to stop him without killing him. I gripped my baton tighter, and threw the dagger Jihyeon had given me earlier.

He screamed as it dug into his shoulder. He stopped screaming when I knocked him out with the baton. He’d been too distracted to run from me. My fingers stung from the impact.

I hoped he was still alive, because that was a really strong hit. He was lying in the dirt, looking like a normal man now. I pulled the knife out of his shoulder. He was bleeding, but the blood floated by me instead of soaking into his clothes or something. I turned.

Sangeo-po’s power was to control blood around her, as well as turning into a monster with sandpaper-like skin. The blood made her tougher and stronger. She was an even matchup with Jihyeon-unni, who was bleeding from a dozen shallow scrapes all over her body.

More blood floated towards Sangeo-po. She lashed out at Jihyeon, but she caught the blow on her bamboo sword, which splintered halfway down. The woman grinned, revealing rows and rows of sharp teeth. “Got you.”

I need to stop her without killing… I thought of what I had just done to the man. …or permanent injury. Fog. I revised my question to not include the last part.

“Nope,” Jihyeon said. She stabbed Sangeo-po with a sharp noise that made my ears hurt, breaking the rest of her sword and knocking the breath—and the blood shield—out of the monstrous woman.

The moment when her shield went down, before it could reform, I bashed her in the head with my baton. She screamed in anger, and maybe pain.

“Sibal! That fucking hurts, you bitch!” She lunged at me, but I was already stepping backwards, and she fell short. Blood started covering her shark-like skin again.

Jihyeon followed up on my attack with a hit of her own, with her no-longer-empowered bamboo sword’s hilt on her head.

Sangeo-po collapsed, moaning. She reverted back into her human form, with black hair permed into curls, and also around thirty years old.

“Where did the boy go?” I glanced back, but there was still no sign of him.

“Narae got her,” Jihyeon said. She didn’t sound very out of breath. She dropped the hilt of her sword on the packed dirt. “We need to go, now. Can you climb the fence?”

Can I get to the other side of the fence? “Yes.”

“Great.” She backed away, then ran at the fence and jumped over it, accompanied by another loud crack. The sounds probably had to do with her power—the fence was probably two meters high. I stared for just a moment, then started scaling the fence. We jogged towards the alleys. I was gasping for breath, though it didn’t affect my ability to run, thanks to my power. My heart was thundering in my ears. I compared myself to Jihyeon-unni, who was still breathing evenly. I would have to start exercise if I wanted to make a habit of fighting people.

Did I want to? I wasn’t so sure. Fighting was visceral and terrifying, but I couldn’t deny there was excitement in it, too.

We turned a corner into a dead end. There was a girl my age, with a long ponytail, and a man that was more Jihyeon-unni’s age and wearing slim, black cyclist’s sunglasses. He waved.

“I felt sorry for the enforcer boy,” the girl said. “He couldn’t do anything.”

“Yes, you’re so good, Narae,” the man said, patting her on the head. She scowled at him, and he smirked.

“Let’s go,” Jihyeon said.

A screen appeared in front of the man, showing an image of a room. Like CCTV. “Touch the screen,” the man told me. I did, and so did the other two.

I heard a pop, then I was in that room. It had fake wooden floors and some plastic foldup chairs, and smelled faintly like mold. Teleporting felt strange, like I had blinked and found myself facing the other way.

“Daeyeong Street, behind the gas station,” Narae told the man. He wrote it down.

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

“Dohyun forgets places he teleports from until he goes back,” she said, “so I’m reminding him where he has to go. He’s a bit of a babo.” Dohyun flicked her on the forehead. She glared at him. “You are, though!”

“We have a kitchen this way,” Unni told me, leading me towards a different room. “Are you hungry?”

I said no, but she grabbed my hand anyways, offering to give me a tour. I immediately stumbled and collapsed, though. My legs felt about as strong as two sheets of paper. I blushed. “I, umm, am not very healthy.”

She snorted. “For someone who’s not fit, you did pretty well.”

“I don’t think I can stand up…”

She frowned at me, then swooped me up in a bridal carry. “We’ll put you on a guest bed, then.” She laughed at my terrified expression. I really didn’t like being picked up, but I also wasn’t able to resist, with how tired I was.

I checked my power.

Amendment: resist without seriously hurting her. The plan suggested stabbing her in the eye to make her drop me. I let go of the dagger and baton I realized I was still holding.

My power was like that one philosopher we learned about in ethics class, who claimed that people couldn’t be forced into anything because they could always choose to kill themselves. Just like that, I could always get out of a situation with enough murder. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to laugh or be terrified, but a strange giggle slipped out.

Jihyeon looked amused. “You’re really tired, aren’t you?” When had she taken her sunglasses off? She looked so different with normal glasses.

Now that I wasn’t standing up, I felt so very tired.

I could try and stay alert, but I didn’t need to, not right now.

I was asleep before Unni put me in bed.

Despite everything, I felt safe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks Cloud, BeaconHill, and tearlessNevermore for being various idea-pingers, betas and SAN checkers. BeaconHill gets a duffel bag with a handgun stuffed inside. There’s one bullet left in the mag and one in the chamber.
> 
> Incidentally, the philosopher in question is Jean-Paul Sartre, and his idea was RADICAL FREEDOM.
> 
> Edit: I almost forgot! Thanks Forgery and Foxtail for helping me with genning capes. In order, they are: Greenscreen (Dohyeon) & Daeta (Narae); Ikki (the boy) & Sangeo-po & Dorongnyong. Foxtail is a cape-generating genius. Pita let me borrow two capes genned by Foxtail.
> 
> I've apparently been making a habit of stealing borrowing Pita's capes. If you know Mass Effect, he has a neat ME/Worm crossover here, called Crucible.


	6. Obsidian Edge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A girl with a knife and her brother make their way through the wilderness after the end.

Scrape.

Pause.

Scrape.

Zhiyin ran the edge of her knife against many tiny edges of the stone block. It took away from the edges of the stone block but made the knife edge neater and prettier. Less painful. There were too many edges in the world, conflicting, nasty, and barbed. The knife edge was simple. A single line. She inspected it. Maybe the fact that it was such a pure edge made the imperfections more obvious. She raised the knife again.

“You know making a knife that sharp is bad for it, right?” the boy said. The caretaker. She looked at him. The boy hesitated. “Because, uhmm, if it’s too sharp, it’ll break? … Dammit, nevermind.” He played with the ragged, poorly cut tips of his hair.

Zhiyin turned her gaze back to the many small edges and the single almost pure edge.

Scrape.

She felt the boy sit next to her, lean against the crumbling brick wall. The concrete floor was edges too, now that she looked at it, though they were jumbled. Not aligned. It didn’t hurt her too much. Same for the forest that started where the concrete ended. Nature usually wasn’t very sharp. The thousands of tree leaves made edges that tickled.

Scrape.

“I think we’re closer to the portal,” he said. “Last night there were lights in the distance. ‘Cross the valley. We’ll have proper food, again. I think.”

Scrape.

“I hope.” There was a sigh. “Well then. Zhiyin?”

She heard her name, and turned to look. The boy pulled something out of his backpack. It was food, a metal tin with the Chinese characters for RATIONS stamped on the side, with the little square, then the rice character, then the one that looked like an evil eye. It had already been opened. There were a lot of ugly edges on it, and she cringed. The boy jumped a little.

“Oh. Oh, I’m sorry. Fuck, I forgot—”

His words were edges, too, even if they were directed at himself and not towards Zhiyin. She made a weak noise of protest, edged away. It hurt. She _could_ let go and make it stop, but somehow she knew that she shouldn’t. So she held on.

“Oh fu— No. No.” He dropped the tin back into the bag, hiding away the pain. He took a deep breath.

“Okay.”

He rummaged around in his bag. The curled-up barbs that had surrounded him slowly faded away. He had a block on his palm, now, wrapped in edges, the pure kind. She would’ve liked to touch them, but they were pliable, impermanent, compared to the blade in her hands right now.

He unwrapped it and broke off a piece, held it up to her.

She opened her mouth obediently and chewed. It tasted faintly sweet, and was dry.

The boy had some, too.

“I think of this every time,” he said. “That I’m just glad you _do_ eat. You have to eat to be healthy you know, right? Do you? Well, you should.”

Zhiyin ran her knife against the stone again. The blade rasped.

“It’s lucky that we’re still. Here. Still here. You know.” The boy was looking into the bag. “Remember the mountain? If we’d left home just a little later, maybe we would’ve died too.” Zhiyin did remember. A gold speck in the sky. A line connecting to the earth. Spreading light. The memory was faint, though. Almost imagined, instead of lived-through. She stopped her motions, trying to figure out why.

Oh, that’s why. She couldn’t remember feeling any edges, then.

The boy prompted her, and she got another mouthful of dry rations to chew on.

“I think that was the last time you said anything,” he said, looking upwards, now. Leaning on his hands. Zhiyin followed his gaze, but there was only the blue sky above. There were never any edges in the sky. It felt wrong, like looking at something so black that it seemed like it didn’t exist, but it was also good to not have pain.

He didn’t continue, at least not immediately. When he did, his voice had a tremor in it. “I miss hearing you talk. I miss talking to _you_. I don’t know what’s happened to you… I hope a doctor can fix it. I hope the portal city has a doctor.” He rubbed at his eyes. “You’re the only one I know that’s left, Zhiyin. Mom and Dad, and our aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins, I think t-they’re”—he drew a shuddering breath—”They’re all dead. Everyone. Zhiyin, I don’t know what to do, honestly. I’m trying so hard, but you’re always the one who knew what to do. I was the stupid little si—little brother, always chasing after you and you had all the ideas and they were all so good… You knew what to do, Zhiyin, you really did...”

Zhiyin’s shoulder was heavy, and damp. The boy was leaning on her, on her left side. She pressed a finger down on the knife. It felt right. Nice and sharp and straight. Too bad it would turn ugly again, soon. It never lasted.

The boy kept leaning on her. She wondered if he would give her more of the crumbly food.

The wind blew through the edges on the trees, making rustling noises that felt the same way the edges did. Soft and… and rustle-y.

It was more like a feeling of uneasiness at first. Then she felt the dozens of needles moving through the forest. She breathed in sharply. They were good edges, so it didn’t hurt, but suddenly so many…

The boy straightened. “What’s the matter?”

Zhiyin raised her blade and pointed, lining up her good edge with the dozens of good edges in the forest. The boy squinted, then inhaled sharply. “Get up, we have to—”

“Stop. Don’t move.” The voice came from a splotch of grey. Zhiyin thought it had been shadows, but it was actually a woman. She cringed. The woman’s words felt like grabbing a cactus. She tried to focus on the pretty needles in the woman’s belt, and the blade in her hand. It was hard. The words were so much more present. Should she...?

The boy slowly raised his hands. “Who are you?” he said.

The woman was wearing a tattered grey and white cloak, and had a featureless mask covering her face in the same colors. It reminded Zhiyin of cows, the way everything was patterned. She was holding up a long stick, probably as long as Zhiyin was tall.

The boy wasn’t making barbs. It was probably okay.

“Huh. Didn’t expect you to speak English, girl. You CUI?”

The boy shook his head. “Never even been to China, ma’am. And I’m not a girl.”

The woman snorted. “Polite, at least. Didn’t take you for a boy. What are you doing out here?” She lowered her… her gun.

“Looking for the portal, ma’am. My sister, she’s kinda sick, and we’re running low on food.”

“Names?”

“Matt Zhang, and she’s Zhiyin.”

Zhiyin turned towards the boy on hearing her name, but the boy wasn’t paying attention to her.

The woman readjusted her grip on her weapon, then raised a hand to her head—though was it really a hand? It was colored strangely, and had edges when people usually didn’t. “Two runners, Asian boy about five feet four and Asian girl five feet five. Girl is armed. Boy speaks English. Claimed names are Matt Jang, girl Joo-een Jang.” She mangled the pronunciation of Zhiyin’s name. The woman stood like that for a while more, head inclined. The boy shifted his weight from one foot to another, hands minutely trembling in the air.

The older, sharp words were fading away, now. While she couldn’t _feel_ non-sharp ones, they helped cover up the barbs. Not that they ever fully went away, prickly on her skin.

“Copy that,” the woman said. “Alright, good news, you’re cleared to come in. Bad news, it’s two hours’ walk that way”—she pointed with her chin—”and we’re going to have to start right now. Take the lead.” The boy hesitated. The woman quickly added, “You can lower your hands now, but no sudden moves.”

The boy turned towards Zhiyin. “You heard her, right?” he said in Chinese. “We have to go. I… I _think_ she’s from the town I saw. I think. I hope you don’t mind if I pack up the sharpening block.” Zhiyin stared back at the boy, then looked down at the food he was still holding. He followed her gaze. “Oh, right…”

The boy picked up the lid of the box for the many-edge stone as Zhiyin chewed. He put the whole thing in the bag, then shouldered it. “This way.”

She followed the boy downhill, still trying to unstick the no-longer-dry food from her teeth. He looked back a couple times, and when he did, she did, too. The lady with the gun was trailing them. Though she wasn’t pointing the gun at them, her gaze was still intense.

They walked quietly like that for a long time.

“You’re from the town over there, right?” The words were English, so the boy was probably talking to the woman. They irritated her skin as they brushed past her, like a cucumber. Prickly spines hidden in smoothness.

“Yes,” the woman said. “Call me Sierras, if you want.”

“How… how is the town?”

The woman didn’t immediately reply. “Getting by,” she said eventually. “Not enough of us to keep order, though.”

“Order?”

“Used to be Protectorate. There’s bandits everywhere, and even worse, _cape_ bandits.”

“So you’re a hero?”

“Never stopped.”

“I’d thought people would help each other out, when everything’s so bad.”

“That’s what you’d _think_. No, boy, not having the parents around means the kids set fire to the house, and electrocute themselves to death in the process.”

“Why do you keep calling me boy, ma’am? I have a name. It’s Matt.”

“I call everyone boy. Hell, I called _Legend_ boy. Still do, actually.”

The boy made a huffing sort of noise. Zhiyin furrowed her brows, trying to figure out what it meant.

A laugh. That’s what it was. A good thing. Probably. No sharpness.

“Okay, that actually does make it better.”

“Well, I’m glad you think so.”

The conversation trailed off.

“Wait,” the woman said. “Tell her to wait.”

“Zhiyin?”

She turned.

“You heard Sierras.” The next words were directed towards the woman. “She knows English too, ma’am.”

The woman looked around, turning her whole body rather than just her head. “Something’s—”

A woman blurred out of the trees and crashed into the gun-woman, sending her straight into a pretty blade-edge that had appeared from nowhere. Little white pellets rained from the other side and hit the ground, sprouting even more large swords. The boy shouted.

Zhiyin was stumbling, overwhelmed by the new sensations.

“Fuck _you_ and your prissy, holy bullshit!” the new woman yelled, punctuating each word by slamming the gun-woman against the ground. They were struggling against each other.

“Get the _fuck_ on the ground or I’m gonna blow your brains out!” A man had appeared, and was pointing one palm each at Zhiyin and the boy. “Now!”

Their voices positively bristled with snarled, twisting thorns and cut through to Zhiyin’s core. She had to do it. It hurt too much. She grabbed the edges, all of the edges, even the ones inside her, and _pushed_. She cried out in pain as all of the edges within her stabbed out.

 

 

 

I turned into a mass of black spikes like a sea urchin, and impaled the torso of the man in a dozen places.

But more importantly, I felt like I had stepped sideways out of a waterfall, or like I’d realized I had been looking at a picture the wrong way up. Clarity. No more edges within me to clutter up my mind. Nothing to distract me now.

Matt was cringing, curled up on the ground. I’d startled him out of his wits, pretty much. He’d seen this happen before, but I supposed you never could get used to it. I wouldn’t ever hurt my little brother, but how could he know that? I couldn’t speak in this form, and I couldn’t think in the other, but I wish I could tell him that simple, undeniable truth. I knew that from his perspective, I always exploded unpredictably and lethally, and it was sheer luck that he hadn’t died yet.

I’d had the presence of mind to keep all of my spikes away from Matt when changing. Each spike was a geometrically impossible construct made entirely of edges. They would probably cut clean through anything. The way light scattered and diffracted through each spike… somehow, the physics worked out, and they looked like polished obsidian with a thousand thousand facets inside.

Clearly Sierras had a blade-resistant coat, because she hadn’t been sliced into two pieces from being slammed into the huge swords the man had made with his power. And when the pine needles and deciduous leaves on the forest floor had gained edges as sharp as knives, when I’d turned the man and the other woman’s own clothes into weapons against them, I’d remembered to dull the edges on Sierras’s clothes, because… because she didn’t deserve that.

The man was dead many times over already, and the woman who’d attacked us… I tried not to pay attention to her. She’d dodged my body’s spikes, but had instead been mangled by her own clothes.

I only had so much time I could stay in this state before I had to turn back. I wish I could’ve stayed forever. Then at least I could _think_. I knew I was always me, even if I wasn’t transformed, just… less of me. But I couldn’t help but feel like I was about to die, when all these spikes were shoved back into me and gummed up my head, when I couldn’t think straight anymore. I tried to enjoy what I had.

Matt stopped trembling, as he realized he was still alive. I didn’t have eyes, but I could tell he was looking at the spikes all around him, that he was being careful not to touch them. Not that I would’ve let him. I wondered if I could write a message, somehow communicate that I was still there—that I existed, that I’m not just a blank shell, that I can _think!_ —but I didn’t have that level of fine control over my spikes. I’d be more likely to cut him into pieces.

I ached. The body that I didn’t have started to hurt. I knew my time was quickly running out. It was too short, and too soon, but did I really have a choice?

I didn’t know if it worked that way, but I tried hard to hold onto one thought, something that would hopefully last when I fell back into the twilight of my own mind. I wanted to—I _needed_ to… to show Matt that I loved him. Tell him I appreciate what he’s done for me. I… I wanted to hold his hand. Give him a hug. Smile. Something. _Anything_.

The spikes were coming back, now, and my control over all the edges in the area was sliding out of my grasp, like a length of rope slips out of the hand of someone hanging from a precipice. I bid my farewell to lucidity.

And even as I started to turn back, I kept holding onto those thoughts, as I lost grip on the edges, as they instead protruded into _me_ , as my head filled with the buzzing, crawling, obnoxiously _present_ sensation of every edge I could see, from the leaves, to the bark, to the rocks, to the bag, to yes even the dirt and my knife and the big blades which fade away and the grass and the needles and the air and the the

 

 

 

“The fuck was that,” the woman muttered with a groan.

“No… no profanity, please, ma’am,” the boy said. “My sister doesn’t like it.”

Neither of them got up.

“You okay, boy?”

“Were those the bandits?”

“What do you think?”

The boy rolled to his feet, carefully, and stood. He made his way over to the woman, almost tripping at one point. “I haven’t been hurt by Zhiyin yet,” he said. “I don’t know why or how, but… I’m glad. I don’t know if she could live without someone to take care of her. Are you okay, though, ma’am?”

“Been through worse,” she muttered. “Think I got a concussion. Fu—frick me. Frick. Doesn’t feel like real swearing.”

The words tickled.

The boy walked to Zhiyin. “Are you still okay?”

Zhiyin looked into his eyes.

The boy nodded.

“So. Sister’s a cape?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” She groaned, and slowly sat up. “Base, Sierras.” She waited a beat. “Attacked by Phoenix and Bladecall. Both dead. Joo-een, the girl, is a Breaker, Shaker, Striker who turns into spikes, makes everything sharp. I have moderate injuries including a concussion. The boy is unharmed. Would appreciate an escort back.”

The boy kept looking at Zhiyin. She blankly looked back. His lips changed shape, then he looked down at her hands. “Oh,” he said. “You dropped your knife.” He glanced around, then crouched to pick it up. The edge was ruined, like he had said. When Zhiyin had dropped it. She took it, and felt her other hand twitch.

“Right. We just need to wait here for circa thirty minutes and _maybe_ a Mover will be free to help us back,” the woman said.

“I… I’m not sure if I want to be next to... those.” The boy gestured at the corpses, and the feathers scattered everywhere.

“Too bad, boy. Not about to brain myself trying to walk.” Sierras slumped against the tree trunk where there had been a blade moments before.

The boy sat next to Zhiyin.

Her hand found his.

He jerked. Turned to look at her.

Zhiyin’s other hand played with her knife. She held it blade-up, rubbing her thumb along its ruined, ugly, but still-better-than-the-tin-can edge.

The boy’s eyes grew shiny. He dipped his head. Squeezed her hand.

She squeezed back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you much, BeaconHill, profHoyden for beta'ing. Bacon gets a ration cube. It's the densest, still-edible chunk of food you could ever imagine. It's the stuff that sticks to the roof of your mouth instantly.
> 
> Thanks to Forgery and Nonagon for the two nameless capes who instantly get gibbed by Zhiyin. Their sacrifice will be remembered.
> 
> This was an experimental piece. I tried to emphasize the shard-screwiness by having 3rd person limited PoV with no commentary (angrily, sadly, looked concerned...), and the switch to 1st person was to show that there was still a person in there in a very jarring way. 3rd person limited with no commentary is pretty much the furthest emotional distance you can get, and 1st person is the closest, so I thought the contrast might be interesting. I would greatly appreciate feedback on whether it worked.


End file.
